Visit Winelands

Flow was approached by Destinate, a marketing company, to build the digital home of South African wine tourism, Visit Winelands, a fully responsive website to promote South Africa’s 19 wine routes as tourist destinations to domestic and international travellers.

The website and brand criteria included:

Develop an online identity that speaks to South Africa’s existing destination marketing and wine marketing efforts, namely South Africa Tourism, WESGRO, VINPRO and Wines of South Africa

Develop a visually gorgeous website, with a strong wine tourism angle that highlights the places to stay and things to do along South Africa's wine tourism routes

Develop a website that integrates with additional e-marketing efforts, including social media campaigns, blogger campaigns and upcoming events

Showcase South Africa’s 19 wine routes equally, both visually and from a content perspective

Flow Communications built the site using Craft CMS, a user-friendly, future-focused content management system. Craft CMS offered a systematic process for loading rich video content, creating and editing content for each of the wine routes, a nifty Google maps integration, and integration with a social media and blogger campaign (#VisitWinelands).

Across the website, related static and dynamic content is cross-pollinated by means of content linking between news entries, events entries and route landing pages. Each static wine route page promotes relevant news and events taking place specifically in that region, while at the same time, news and event entry pages link back to the specific routes profiled.

Dynamic content is updated by the client regularly, and uploaded to the website frequently through the news section. Content about events feeds in from a sourced RSS feed, and is edited and maintained by client leads in many of the 19 tour offices.

A live social wall that streams from three sources and pulls content featuring the campaign hashtag #VisitWinelands is a unique differentiator for the South Africa Wine Tourism website. A custom Google Map implementation with destination tags plots each route region, so travellers can access directions to the route when browsing on mobile. In addition, the website has been built on a CMS that allows for integration with future technology, and the possibility of adding e-commerce and commercialisation when required.

Website objectives:

A bespoke-design website that will promote South Africa’s 19 wine routes equally as wine tourist destinations

A website that promotes South Africa as a wine tourism destination

A website that is visually appealing and renders well on all devices

A website that highlights places to stay and things to do in South Africa’s 19 wine routes

A website that brings together South Africa’s industry partners and leaders in both wine and tourism

A website that can be scaled for commercialisation and e-commerce in future

A website that integrates well with social media and blogger campaigns